Street-corner appeals for help create ethical turmoil

It’s a part of city life we have all encountered. Maybe on a street corner or while pumping gas at a service station, someone hits you up with a hard-luck story.

It’s an uncomfortable thing. Your impulses go to war with each other. You want to help, but you don’t want to be scammed. You want to feel safe, but you don’t want to be judgmental. You want to be courteous, but you don’t want to prolong contact.

Pam Davis-Young dealt with all those emotions in a big way in a recent encounter. “I’m still struggling with it,” she said.

Pam was leaving her yoga class at Methodist Charlton Medical Center in the Red Bird area of southern Dallas about 7 p.m. She was pulling out of a parking garage on the back side of the hospital campus when two young women came running toward her car, hollering something.

Her first reaction was fear. She wanted to hit the gas and go. But in the next instant, she realized there was a baby. “One girl is screaming. She’s saying her baby can’t breathe. The other is saying ‘Can you help us get to the ER?’”

Honesty forces Pam to admit that matters of age, race and socioeconomics probably played into her internal conflict. Pam is 56. She guessed the two women to be about 20. She’s white. They were black. She assumed they were without a car and running from nearby apartments.

Though she still feared this might be a trick, Pam stopped. The women jerked open her car doors and climbed in.

Pam zoomed out to the street and around to the other side of the hospital to reach the emergency room while the frantic mother was blowing into the baby’s mouth. The baby appeared to be conscious but listless.

Pam screeched to a stop in front of the ER and the women scrambled out. And just that fast, it was all over.

But Pam has agonized ever since. Did she do the right thing? What if it had been a trick and she had been robbed, or worse? Harder to contemplate: What if she had refused and put the baby’s life in jeopardy?

The next day, Pam tried to find out if the baby was OK, but privacy policies kept her from learning anything.

Fortunately, few of us will have to wrestle with the big issues Pam faced. But we deal with a piece of it every time someone approaches our car door at an intersection.

My policy is not to hand out money on the streets. I think it’s counterproductive. I try to help in better ways by donating a little time and money to local agencies serving the poor and homeless.

But a recent gas-station encounter left me wrestling with myself. As usual, I turned a guy down. “Oh, I don’t want money. I just need a few gallons of gas,” he said, raising the small gas can in his hand. “I coasted in here,” he said, pointing to an old pickup across the way.

Reflexively, I shook my head again. He looked hurt and wandered off. And I wondered for days whether my fears of a scam had overcome basic decency.

Coincidentally, this issue came up the other day in a chat with Keith Price. He is executive director of the Austin Street Center, which has long served the homeless in Dallas.

“People ask me all the time what they should do,” he said. “I have come to the conclusion that whatever you do, you’re right.”

First of all, he said, you can’t truly assess a person’s situation or character in an encounter of a few seconds. Sometimes you can’t do it after months of knowing someone.

So he said it’s never wrong to go with your instincts. “If you give money, they might actually use it well,” he said. “And if they don’t, that’s 100 percent on them. You gave with good intentions. That’s all you can do.

“And if you don’t give, they have choices. They know we exist. They can come here. They can make a decision that will make them better,” he said. “Wherever your heart leads you is exactly correct.”

I like that. It takes some pressure off. I hope it helps Pam find some peace in her decision.

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About Steve Blow

Career track: Worked as a reporter at the Fort Worth Press and the Corpus Christi Caller-Times. Joined The Dallas Morning News in 1978. Worked as a reporter until 1989, when I began writing the column.

Most unforgettable experience on the job: Probably flying in a fighter jet with the Blue Angels. Somewhere in the midst of that looping, zooming, twirling flight, I remember thinking, "I love my job."

Something people don't know about me: In college, I worked in a funeral home. (It was more lively than you might expect.)

If I had two spare hours, I would: See a movie, preferably one with lots of laughs and not a single gun battle.

The secret of a good news column is: Introduce the reader to a person worth knowing. Or put into words the reader's own thoughts. Or best of all, offer a view that differs from the reader's, but in a way that intrigues, not antagonizes.